Scientists and entrepreneurs of old spent millennia trying to transmute lead into gold. Today, a new and more intellectually rigorous kind of alchemy has begun to produce important benefits for an economy that still relies heavily on fossil fuels.

Gordon Electric Supply has provided electrical and lighting products and services in the Chicago market for more than 60 years. It is the only woman-owned, small business distributor of Square D products in the Chicago area.

Were they visionaries or lucky gamblers? Thirty years ago, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory established the lab’s first experimental parallel computing facility. Today, high-performance computing has become essential to virtually all science and engineering, and Argonne houses one of the fastest parallel machines in the world in support of scientific discovery.